Olli Mustonen was the alert soloist in Stravinsky‘s three works for piano and orchestra, his fingers kept so busy-busy in all three that he had less time than usual for the arm-windmill antics that make his playing hard to watch. Of these works, the two from the neoclassical 1920s -- the Concerto for Piano and Winds, a masterpiece, and the Capriccio, modest and bubbly -- were worth the effort. The third, the 1959 Movements, is short but awful, Stravinsky keeping up with the guys (Boulez and Berio, mostly), affecting the air of modernism that ends up as gross parody. Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh made a nice point in his pre-concert talk. The greatest dread of the modernist, he said, is that people won’t think you‘re modern enough. It certainly applies to the tatters that survive from Stravinsky’s pathetic last years. Movements put me in mind of a movie I once saw, with the senile Picasso quickly daubing his signature on small porcelain plates and handing them off to be sold. How sad.
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